#a truly multiracial democratic society

[egoschwank]

al things considered — when i post my masterpiece #1183

first posted in facebook april 22, 2023

william edouard scott -- "a study for 'interruption'" [a mural at the 1940 american negro exposition in chicago] (ca. 1940)

"the major problem of life is learning how to handle the costly interruptions. the door that slams shut, the plan that got sidetracked, the marriage that failed. or that lovely poem that didn't get written because someone knocked on the door" ... martin luther king jr.

"as a result of the discrimination towards african americans at the 1933 century of progress exposition, james washington, a real estate developer, conceived of the american negro exposition. on july 4, 1940, president franklin delano roosevelt, from his hyde park home, pressed a button to turn on the lights, officially opening the american negro exposition. [...] artist william edouard scott created a series of 24 murals for the event, which took him three months to complete" ... wikipedia

"i ask you, america, is this not signing witness in your soul? who are you to deny me the right to cast my vote in the streets of america in the senate halls of america? who are you to deny the right to speak? i who am myself also america. i who cleared your forests and laid your thoroughfares. who are you to be presumptuous to tell me where to ride, and where to stand, and where to sit? who are you to lynch the flesh of your flesh? who are you to say who shall live and who shall die? who are you to tell me where to eat and where to sleep? who are you america but me' ... margaret walker

"there may be some difficulties, some interruptions, but as a nation and as a people, we are going to build a truly multiracial, democratic society that maybe can emerge as a model for the rest of the world" ... john lewis

"please ... do not pardon these interruptions" ... al janik

[rebel-girl-queen-of-my-world]

“Making Jewish people the face of the US-Israel war machine is dangerous. The far right is rising all around the world, and with it, a real and violent threat against Jewish people, but rather than talking about or working together to defeat fascism and injustice everywhere, western states are mis-defining antisemitism to justify ongoing genocide.” — Stefanie Fox

JVP’s Executive Director, Stefanie Fox, spoke to the @unitednations this week where she conveyed the urgent need to withstand the U.S. campaign of repression aimed at silencing, criminalizing, and crushing the movement for Palestinian freedom.

Her address comes at a moment in which militarized police target and brutalize hundreds of anti-Zionist Jews alongside their Palestinian classmates across student encampments. Encampments where Jewish students led shabbat services and passover seders, and countless young Jews have never felt more Jewish than while participating in the pro-Palestine multifaith, multiracial community committed to justice for all people.

Repressing the movement for Palestinian liberation is a perilous path that paves the way for authoritarian policies, undermines democratic rights, and closes the space for civil society worldwide.

In the words of Dalia Darazim of @sjp.columbia who also testified, “Our battle ultimately is not with university administrators. It is with the entire imperial core. The crackdown on college campuses is just one symptom of the colonial violence that will continue as long as the Zionist occupation over Palestine persists. We know our universities are just one front in this battle for liberation and they are a crucial reminder that none of us are truly free until Palestine is free.”

Watch the full panel at the link in our bio or at https://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/46089

[driftbending]

Ultimately, then, American democracy depends on us---the citizens of the United States. No single political leader can end a democracy; no single leader can rescue one, either. Democracy is a shared enterprise. Its fate depends on all of us. [...] To save our democracy, Americans need to restore the basic norms that once protected it. But we must do more than that. We must extend those norms through the whole of a diverse society. We must make them truly inclusive. America's democratic norms, at their core, have always been sound. But for much of our history, they were accompanied---indeed, sustained---by racial exclusion. Now those norms must be made to work in an age of racial equality and unprecedented ethnic diversity. Few societies in history  have managed to be both multiracial and genuinely democratic. That is our challenge. It is also our opportunity. If we meet it, America will truly be exceptional.

How Democracies Die, by Steven Levitsky & Daniel Ziblatt

[hogtown-socialist-alternative]

Can the Working Class Change Society? Socialists Say Yes

By Tom Crean -September 10, 2018

One hundred years after the Russian Revolution and 50 years after the revolutionary general strike in France in 1968, many on the left question whether the working class has a central role in changing society. This is understandable given the enormous retreat of the labor movement in recent decades. Working people in the U.S. [see the companion piece “The American Working Class“] no longer look to the unions as the leading force in the struggle for a better life as they did in the 1930s and 1940s and to a degree after World War II. Also the U.S. is virtually alone among Western countries in having no historical experience of a mass working-class political party which challenges for control of the government.

For a Self-Aware Working Class

Karl Marx, the pioneer of scientific socialism, in describing the modern working-class, differentiated between it being a “class in itself” as opposed to a “class for itself.” The working class, defined as those who have to sell their ability to work to the employer class to survive, has enormous potential social power because of its ability to stop the wheels of the economy. As the accompanying piece explains, contrary to those who say that globalization or automation have eliminated the American working class, it remains without doubt the majority of society. While the capitalist media is at pains to obscure this, just-in-time production, logistics hubs, and other large concentrations of workers, like in airports, show that the big corporations are vulnerable to collective action.

But the key issue is whether the working class moves from being an objective reality, a “class in itself” to being a force that sees its interests as counterposed to those of the capitalists and organizes to challenge their power. Since the Great Recession, working people in the U.S. have become keenly aware that the top 1% and even the top .01% have gained disproportionately while the bottom 99% and especially the bottom 50% are sliding backwards.

Progressives often point to how the tax system has increasingly favored the rich. This is absolutely true but there is a deeper reality: Massive gains in productivity have been made by American workers, yet their wages have barely risen while profits have skyrocketed. The bosses have been winning a one-sided class war. It has recently been reported that even with virtual “full employment” wages in the U.S. are not keeping pace with inflation. This reflects the lack of an organized challenge to the bosses’ power in the workplace.

A Grim Future

There is massive anger at social inequality and the social crisis which faces large sections of the working class. There is a loss of faith in institutions and especially in the political establishment. There is a growing awareness that the future under capitalism promises endless inequality, automation replacing good jobs, and a developing climate catastrophe. In poor countries, wars, famines, and massive displacement of people are likely to intensify. Capitalism no longer pretends to offer a vision of a more abundant future for ordinary people.

The growing anger of working people and young people was reflected in the 2016 campaign of Bernie Sanders who called for a “political revolution against the billionaire class.” It is also reflected in the massive interest in socialism, especially among young people. This is continuing with the wave of “democratic socialist” candidates including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. But in the absence of a political force that clearly represents the interests of the working class, the door was opened to the right populism of Donald Trump who also attacked “free trade” deals and proclaimed himself a champion of the working class. This has led to a dangerously reactionary regime which threatens to destroy any remaining gains made through past struggles by workers, women, and African Americans.

But until recently, working class revolt was only expressed in a partial way and largely on the electoral plane. The retreat of organized labor continued – less than 7% of private sector workers are now in a union and strikes at historically low levels. The recent Janus decision by the Supreme Court aims to drastically undermine organization in the public sector where union density remains higher.

This is why the revolt of teachers in West Virginia, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Arizona, Colorado, and North Carolina is so important. Now there is the potential for a major fight by the key UPS workforce against a rotten contract. There are important organizing drives among airport workers. In Missouri, voters defeated an anti-labor “right-to-work” law brought in by the Republicans by a two-to-one margin. In Europe, Amazon warehouse workers in three countries went on strike in July which could inspire workers in logistics here. These are the signs of a desire to fight. What is desperately needed is leadership and a new direction away from the failed approach of labor leaders of the past 30 years – refusal to use militant tactics or to assert labor’s independent political interests.

Lessons of History

The American working class has a rich tradition of struggle over the past 150 years. In the 1930s and ‘40s, powerful multiracial industrial unions were built using bold tactics including local general strikes and workplace occupations (“sitdown” strikes). Black workers were the driving force of the civil rights movement which brought down Jim Crow in the South in the ‘50s and ‘60s. Working-class women were the driving force in changing chauvinist attitudes in the ‘60s and ‘70s as part of massive rank and file labor upsurge.

And yet working people in the U.S. never had a true mass political party that expressed their interests. The absence of this helps explain why our pension and heath care system is so much worse than most advanced capitalist countries where there were powerful social democratic and labor parties. Recent commentary in various mainstream publications asks why socialism was not stronger in the U.S. in the past although some have correctly pointed out that socialists have played a major role in the labor movement at all the key points when it has been moving forward.

There are many arguments for why the U.S. is allegedly “exceptional.” Seth Ackerman, an editor at the widely-read left magazine Jacobin, has argued that at the end of the 19th century the U.S. moved on a different course than other capitalist “democracies,” placing onerous restrictions on the development of third parties. The two main (corporate dominated) parties were institutionalized and Ackerman concludes that “the United States [like the Soviet Union] is also a party-state, except instead of being a single-party state, it’s a two-party state. That is just as much of a departure from the norm in the world as a one-party state,”(“A New Party of A New Type,” Jacobinmag.com).

There are elements of truth in Ackerman’s analysis but it is missing an underlying historical reality. Despite all the obstacles, it was hardly inevitable that a workers party would not be created in the U.S. This could have been achieved in the ‘30s and ‘40s for example but was blocked by key labor leaders – unfortunately with assistance from sections of the left, particularly the Communist Party.

The broader truth is that the obstacles to creating a workers party in the past were not primarily legal but lay in the strength of U.S. capitalism which was increasingly dominant in the 20th century on a world scale. The capitalists were able to concede a higher standard of living for a period but they also made relentless use of racism and nativism to keep the working class divided. But again the rise of the CIO industrial unions in the ‘30s proved that common struggle could begin to overcome profound divisions.

Compared to the postwar boom or even the neoliberal era which began in the late 1970s, the situation today is very different. It is very clear that U.S. capitalism is in decline on a global scale. Restoring the previous position through trade wars or other means is an illusion. The workforce is more diverse and integrated than ever before and, despite all the differences in lived experience, there is a burning need for collective struggle to push back the relentless regime of workplace exploitation and the immiseration of wider and wider sections. When 40% of adults don’t know how they would pay for a $400 emergency while the billionaires’ banks accounts grow ever fatter – it’s time to fight back.

Can a new party representing these common class interests be built? Bernie Sanders raised over $200 million with no corporate money – which all pundits said was impossible – and was only defeated because of a rigged primary. Most progressive workers and young people today continue to pursue the idea of reforming the Democratic Party. As working-class struggle reemerges in a more developed way, the need to for political independence will become clearer and the need for a program that challenges capitalism itself and points towards democratic socialism. This will truly be the emergence of a working class “for itself” in America.

[inhandnetworks-blog]

Can Obama Manage Liberal Backlash Over Budget?

www.inhandnetworks.com

Has President Obama, the man who made even the dourest of liberals smile in 2008, finally made the left not just grouchy but downright angry? And will it come back to bite his party in the midterms this fall? Leading liberals in the blogosphere, the labor movement, and the think tanks say it might.

It's not hard to understand the psychology. Imagine you are a 60-year-old lefty. You came of age in the late 1960s, rallying for peace and a more just society. The story of your adulthood has been one of persistent societal decline. First Richard Nixon, then Ronald Reagan, then Newt Gingrich, then George W. Bush seized the country, ground progress to a halt, and often reversed it. Elect a truly liberal president, an intellectual, multiracial former urban community organizer, say, with a strong electoral mandate and large congressional majorities, and our Treasury should be filled with the taxes of hedge-fund managers. The EPA should be doing a brisk business selling carbon credits in no time.

The hopes that you would have laid on Obama were thus extraordinary, stoked by the grandiose conjecture of political pundits that Obama's election may signal a Rooseveltian or Reaganite paradigm shift in the polity. Obama's moderation, from choosing a centrist, bipartisan cabinet, to choosing a hawkish path on Afghanistan, quickly brought liberals down to a grumpy reality. But they set about supporting the president's plans for economic stimulus and health-care reform, and trained their ire at Republicans who threatened to filibuster at unprecedented levels and Democrats like Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson who extracted enormous compromises from the White House.

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But with Obama's announcement in his State of the Union address, delineated in his budget released Feb. 1, that he wants to freeze domestic discretionary spending for three years, he may have finally caused his base to lose its patience. Liberal activists say the Democratic Party may suffer if their base stays home or simply refuses to engage in the grassroots donating and volunteering that helped propel Obama into office.

"This doesn't signal anything that is going to fire anybody's imagination," says Robert Kuttner, coeditor of The American Prospect magazine and a senior fellow at the Demos think tank. "It's one thing to do small-bore stuff in 1995 when Republicans have taken Congress and the economy is OK. [The spending freeze] is completely contradictory in terms of the need to have a second round of stimulus spending. The White House is not interested in spending that much money on jobs and recovery. Obama's base, all the volunteers—if you look at blog traffic and e-mail traffic among Democrats, people are just beside themselves, this is so feeble."

Indeed, former Labor secretary Robert Reich writes at Politico of the proposal: "Wall Street is delighted. But it means Main Street is in worse trouble than ever. A spending freeze will make it even harder to get jobs back ... His three-year freeze on a large portion of discretionary spending will make it impossible for him to do much of anything for the middle class that's important." And left-wing Web site Firedoglake's instant reaction was more outraged: "Obama is basically saying that the stimulus fixed the economy, that there will be no further government support measures and that he'll govern like a hybrid of John McCain and Herbert Hoover for the rest of his term to curry favor with the deficit maniacs."

Liberal activists point to the risk the Democrats run of looking inconsistent and uncertain in perilous times. "What happens when voters hear 'spending freeze,' then see Democrats working on a second much-needed stimulus?" asks Markos Moulitsas, founder of the massively popular left-leaning blog Daily Kos in an e-mail. "Voters are clearly cynical about the Democrats' ability to govern, and political stunts like this one won't help turn such perceptions around."

"Obama is tacking in multiple directions," concurs Kuttner. "It reads like something that was poll driven. The poll says people care about the deficit, so you do something on that. It doesn't create the impression that the president is on your side—he stands for everything and nothing."

Mainstream political and economic writers have also expressed befuddlement and irritation at the political and policy wisdom, or lack thereof, of Obama's proposal.

This comes in the midst of a developing failure to push health-care reform, a prize liberals have been eyeing since at least Harry Truman's presidency, across the finish line when it has passed both houses of Congress. As Jesse Singal argued, one group essential to Obama's coalition, young voters, may be turned off by that. Likewise, Washington Post blogger Ezra Klein asked whether the Democratic base would be wise to teach their party a lesson by staying home if health care doesn't pass. Poll results released Feb. 2 showing that Democrats would do better in the midterms if they pass health care is sure to reinvigorate the exasperated clamoring from the left. (A Twitter hashtag #passthedamnbill has been gathering steam for weeks.)

The White House, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee did not respond to requests for comment.

Some of the most influential liberal leaders though, are measured in their response to the proposed spending freeze. "My difference with the president is that I think that there should be broader review," says Andrew Stern, president of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). "Everything should be on the table, nonrelated to national security. We should look at the Departments of Defense and State. Twenty billion dollars per year [the projected savings from a discretionary domestic spending freeze] is symbolic but not sufficient."

And Stern adds a cautionary note for Democrats: "If we don't pass health care and have real jobs, it is hard to imagine our members—who are issue voters, not Democrats or Republicans—it's hard to imagine them feeling like the change they voted for has happened, especially in the Senate. In '94 it was almost impossible to get our members excited by that midterm."

"What happened in '94 is people sat on their hands, and unless Obama starts delivering, that's what will happen this fall," predicts Kuttner. And everyone in Washington knows what happened back then.

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